t to please the girl, assured her that no one would
ever suppose her to be an American--their ideas of the American young
woman having been gathered from those who pick out tunes with one
finger on the pianos in the public parlors of the Metropole. Miss
Egerton was said to be intensely interested in her lover's career, and
was as ambitious for his success in the House as he was himself. They
were both very much in love, and showed it to others as little as
people of their class do. The others at the table were General Sir
Henry Kent; Phillips, the novelist; the Austrian Minister and his
young wife; and Trevelyan, who painted portraits for large sums of
money and figure pieces for art; and some simply fashionable smart
people who were good listeners, and who were rather disappointed that
the American explorer was no more sun-burned than other young men who
had stayed at home, and who had gone in for tennis or yachting.

The worst of Gordon was that he made it next to impossible for one to
lionize him. He had been back in civilization and London only two
weeks, unless Cairo and Shepheard's Hotel are civilization, and he
had been asked everywhere, and for the first week had gone everywhere.
But whenever his hostess looked for him, to present another and not so
recent a lion, he was generally found either humbly carrying an ice to
some neglected dowager, or talking big game or international yachting
or tailors to a circle of younger sons in the smoking-room, just as
though several hundred attractive and distinguished people were not
waiting to fling the speeches they had prepared on Africa at him, in
the drawing-room above. He had suddenly disappeared during the second
week of his stay in London, which was also the last week of the London
season, and managers of lecture tours and publishers and lion-hunters,
and even friends who cared for him for himself, had failed to find him
at his lodgings. Trevelyan, who had known him when he was a travelling
correspondent and artist for one of the great weeklies, had found him
at the club the night before, and had asked him to his wife's
impromptu dinner, from which he had at first begged off, but, on
learning who was to be there, had changed his mind and accepted. Mrs.
Trevelyan was very glad he had come; she had always spoken of him as a
nice boy, and now that he had become famous she liked him none the
less, but did not show it before people as much as she had been used
to do. She